Hemingway’s use of the ‘Stream of Consciousness’ technique in his major novels

Hemingway is an experimenter in prose style. He had lived in Paris, and had contacts with Joyce, Gertrude Stein, who had been deeply influenced by Bergson’s concept of time and reality. Joyce and Gertrude Stein had known also William James, the originator of phrase, ‘The Stream of Consciousness.’ Hemingway knew that Bergson had denounced mechanical or clock time which does not help in our comprehending reality. He has delineated the stream of consciousness of some of his characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. 

He refers to The Fourth and the Fifth Dimension achieved through prose, in Greek Hills of Africa. This remark has been interpreted by various critics in different manners. Carpenter in Hemingway’s Fifth Dimension’ observes: “The fourth dimension clearly has something to do with the concept of time and with fictional techniques of describing it.” Harry Levin has pointed out that ‘Hemingway’s style is lacking in the complexity of structure that normally describes the third dimension but that it offers a series of images (much like the moving picture) to convey the impression, of time, sense and immediacy.’ Joseph Warren Beach has suggested that the fourth dimension is related to an ‘aesthetic factor’ achieved by the hero’s recurrent participation in the moral order of world. 

And Malcolm Cowley has also related the fourth dimension of time to ‘the almost continual performance of rites and ceremonies’ suggesting the recurrent pattern of human experience, but has also called the fifth dimension a mystical meaningless figure of speech. Thus, Hemingway’s fourth dimension has been interpreted in different ways. It has something to do with psychological time of Henri Bergson. Gertrude Stein, another exponent of the inner time, was friendly with Hemingway. Even if the fourth dimension is treated ‘the aesthetic factor’ or the hero’s participation in the moral order of the world, it cannot be separated from the concept of the inner time. Carpenter holds the view that the fifth dimension connotes the psychological time. Tracing the origin of the phrase ‘the fifth dimension’ he points out:

“Actually the specific phrase ‘the fifth dimension’ was used in 1931 by P.D. Ouspensky, who defined it to mean the ‘perpetual now.’ Ouspensky, a mystic, was an admirer of Bergson and of William James. Bergson (also an admirer of James had also emphasized that difference between psychological time and physical time). And both these ideas go back go William Jame’s ‘philosophy of radical empiricism’ (that is of immediate or pure experience), which Gertrude Stein (a former pupil of James) had adopted for literary purpose.” 

Hemingway also seems to be preoccupied with this question of inner time. “His literary ideal has been that of immediate empiricism. And his ‘fifth dimensional prose’ has attempted to communicate the immediate experience of perpetual now.” Ouspensky has given the characteristics of the ‘fifth dimension’ and ‘perpetual now’ in his work, A New Model of Universe, published in 1931. The ‘fifth dimension’ forms a surface in relation to the line of time……”Though we are not aware of it, sensations of existence of other time continually enter our consciousness. The ‘fifth dimension’ is movement in the circle, repetition, recurrence, “Ouskpensky has elaborated his views about the ‘perpetual now’ drawing inspiration from Jame’s moment of consciousness and Bergson’s conception of Elan Vital, It is not certain that Hemingway had read Ouspensky, the Russian philosopher.

Henry Bergson expounded his conception of time and reality. Reality cannot be grasped with intellect and cannot be analysed by reason. It is ‘immediate experience’ and is in a state of ‘flux’. Analysis and description have distorted the feeling. It is real duration, ‘the time perceived indivisible.’ The present penalties into the past and merges with the future. It is difficult to pinpoint that it is the present. There can be no instant anterior to it. The question of the present instant is mere abstraction. “Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which revels as it advances.” This duration or the psychological time is opposed to the mechanical time and is unbreakable. 

This inner duration or reality can be comprehended through intuition. In the intuitive experience the subject and the object become one. It is the perception of the mind through intuition. Bergson has enunciated his theory of personality. It is dynamic and in a state of flux. A man’s experience is being enriched every moment and the human personality is always evolving and growing. Hemingway’s characters are engrossed in the present, ‘the perpetual now’. Hemingway introduced repetition, recurrence in the structure of his fiction and depicted inner time of his characters in some of his novels.